Three works from Canadian composer Chiyoko Szlavnics, two electroacoustic compositions incorporating sinewaves, one with a saxophone quartet and the other with two accordions, two flutes and two percussionists; and a string trio of long sustained tones and slow glissandi.

"The fourth disc in the Canadian Composers Series features the music of Chiyoko Szlavnics. The CD contains three works, two of which use sinewaves in conjuncton with acoustic instruments. The title track "During a Lifetime" is written for sinewaves and saxophone quartet, an instrument on which Szlavnics herself used to perform. The final piece, "Reservoir", is composed for sinewaves and an unusual instrumental octet, including two accordions, two flutes and two percussionists. The middle piece 'Freehand Poitras' is for string trio, but like the other works on the disc it is typified by the use of long sustained tones and slow glissandi."-Another Timbre

Szlavnics' use of sustained tones is often derived from line drawings that she does as part of the compositional process: "She deals with sound in a patiently shifting manner, through series of woven-together billows of quiet dynamism. Many of her pieces are effectively translated from drawings that she makes. Often consisting of interleaved matrices of fine lines, it's easy to grasp how their structures serve as foundations for her music. Several hint at an illusory world of perspective that exists between two and three dimensionality, simultaneously evincing depth and flatness."-Nick

Another Timbre interviw with Chiyoko Szlavnics:

"Do you use sinewaves in most of the drawing pieces you've composed, and have you ever composed a piece that is just sinewaves without any instruments?

To answer the second question first, yes, around 2006 I worked a lot with sinewaves and I have a handful of pieces from then that are sinewaves only. In the last five years the majority of my compositions have included sinewaves, but I've reached the point where I'm wanting to separate them again because programming and notating sinewaves is so much work; it makes any new piece twice the amount of work. But I love sinewaves; they don't have to be cold and mechanical. When they're made very sensitively they're so incredibly beautiful and have such a different quality than instruments do. And now I'm feeling a need to find that quality again and the only way to do that is to focus on a few pieces that are just sinewaves again.

You could do everything with sinewaves and it'd be more precise in relation to the drawings, but is there also something about the quality of instrumental sounds that you're drawn to?

Yes, there are two aspects to acoustic instruments. One is that each instrument has an incredibly complex spectrum, which is created by its physical properties. And the way that different instruments' timbres and spectra interact with each other, as well as with sinewaves, is incredibly rich. When I only use sinewaves you don't have this richness; there is so much more interaction that happens with instruments. With sinewaves you might have a very complex chord, but it often doesn't sound complex; it just sounds sweet. Sinewaves are very ethereal and transparent; they have no 'body' or 'skin'. They are a bit like a prism, and the instruments are a bit like light that passes through the prism when they're combined, and suddenly an additional range of colours appears.

With instruments you have a certain quality of sound that you'd never achieve with sinewaves, nor with electronics. You need the actual physical object, like the two accordions in Reservoir, it's amazing what kinds of sounds they produce together! And there's also the human element, which is extremely important: how the musicians start and how they stop, or how they listen and react when another instrument joins them and they play together. Music is a human activity, after all.....

But I think my love of slow tempi and the use of glissandi was born out of two musical sources from when I was still in Toronto. Before I really started really composing, I organised a trio performance for which I transcribed traditional Japanese Gagaku music, which is extremely stately and very slow, and I think that music deeply affected me. And the other source was Indian music. In Toronto there's a large Indian community and there were many classical Indian music concerts, and I remember being intensely moved by some of them. In a way, I think I was reproducing some of both of those musics while improvising on the saxophone; I very much enjoyed bending pitches very slowly, that is, playing very small pitch changes."